Snapcash: A Joint Payment Service by Snapchat and Square

Ephemeral messaging app Snapchat has partnered with mobile payment company Square to launch a new payment service Snapcash.

The newly launched service allows Snapchat users to link their debit cards to their account and send money to a contact by starting a chat on smartphone, typing the dollar sign, entering an amount, and hitting the green button, Snapchat wrote in its official Blog Post. The same is shown in the video above.

This move is in line with Snapchat’s expansion plans which valued at USD 10 billion in its recent fundraising. According to a recent report by comScore, Snapchat is now the third most popular app among millennials (18-34 year olds). The app is more popular than Twitter, Pinterest, Vine, Google+ or Tumblr within millennials demographic.

“We set out to make payments faster and more fun, but we also know that security is essential when you’re dealing with money” the company added.

For now, Snapcash is available in the United States for users who have a debit card and are 18 or older. And, the Snapchat said that debit card information will be securely stored by Square, who will swiftly process the payment and send cash directly to user friend’s bank account.

This feature will be limited by Square’s penetration globally, and Snapchat will need to tie up with different country specific merchants to avoid getting into troubles with government authorities in the respective countries. Although US could be a guinea pig for this feature, since doing monetary transactions over a casual messaging app might not attract all the users. Moreover following the recent news of Snapchat images being leaked on the net the security is still an issue.

Snapchat also announced on Monday that it will ban all third party apps access to its apps to enhance user privacy and security, however this still might not soothe the sceptical ones.